Gurwitz: Have you forgotten Darfur, Mr. President?

Texas on the Potomac regularly shares with you the work of some of Hearst Newspapers’ best columnists. Today, we are pleased to share with you this commentary by San Antonio Express-News columnist Jonathan Gurwitz, one of the leading conservative voices in Texas.

The orator at the Save Darfur rally in the spring of 2006 captivated the crowd of 100,000 on the National Mall. He spoke in an almost biblical cadence and with moral conviction. “Rescue those being led away to death,” he quoted the book of Proverbs. “Hold back those staggering toward slaughter.”

The man at the lectern was a young senator from Illinois. Nine months later, he would launch an improbable presidential candidacy. Today, he sits in the Oval Office.

Much has changed since that sunny day in Washington that brought together dignitaries and luminaries, Elie Wiesel and George Clooney, Republicans and Democrats, a day that inspired hope in the belief that “never again” was more than an empty slogan.

One important thing has not changed. More than four years later, the slaughter in Sudan — what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof long ago called a “genocide in slow motion” — continues.

Four hundred people were killed in Darfur during one week in March, according to the Save Darfur Coalition’s Niemat Ahmadi, herself a native of Darfur. Another 600 were victims of violence in May. Tens of thousands of refugees have been cut off from humanitarian aid. Those numbers add to the toll of 300,000 people who have lost their lives and the 2.7 million who have been driven from their homes since the Sudanese government began its genocidal campaign in 2003.

Last year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir — the architect of ethnic cleansing in Darfur — on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This month, the ICC issued a second arrest warrant for genocide.

Yet al-Bashir travels freely in Africa, last week to Chad, despite the fact that his victims in Darfur are Africans. He travels freely in the Middle East, to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, although the men being castrated and left to bleed to death and the women and girls still targeted for mass rape are Muslim.

That the international community would be so fickle about Darfur is no surprise. Neither is the hypocrisy of the U.N. Security Council, which can expeditiously condemn far less lethal incidents involving some nations yet be so easily distracted from the genocide in Darfur.

What is surprising and shocking is the failure of the United States under the Obama administration to take any meaningful action to stem the violence in Darfur, the coddling of al-Bashir by Obama’s envoy for Sudan, and the inept efforts to sustain a fragile north-south peace agreement — negotiated by the Bush administration in 2005 — that, should it fail, threatens to re-ignite a Sudanese civil war that claimed two million lives over the course of two decades.

“This is President Obama’s Rwanda moment, and it is unfolding now, in slow motion,” wrote Dave Eggers, author of a book about Sudan’s civil war, and human rights activist John Prendergast, co-founder of the Enough Project, in a recent New York Times op-ed. “It is not too late to prevent the coming war in Sudan, and protect the peace we helped build five short years ago.”

The question is whether ending one genocide and preventing another from starting are priorities for anyone in the Obama White House.

“The facts on the ground remain the same. And over time what happens is we get fickle and we get distracted and the searing images of children being slaughtered and women being assaulted start fading from view. And we start worrying about gas prices and we start worrying about elections, and the priorities start drifting down until we no longer have the moral urgency that’s required.”